I have successfully installed the Production Premium suite. In the beginning, all apps ran fine. I automatically updated the suite, and AE now is version 9.0.2. I could use all applications in the suite, including After Effects.

No, not that I'm aware of. There was a compatibility fix for CS4, but the plug-in itself is not hardware accelerated and should not interfere with MediaCore. Magic Bullet products (Looks, Colorista, Frames, Steady) however might. It's definitely worth checking. In addition, I recommend checking the Media Cache. perhaps there are just some damaged conform files in there.

ESI 1010 is my breakout sound card, and ASIO is a common popular sound driver (very low latency).

Conclusion:

I did too many things at the time, Updating NVIDIA, Installing Key Correct Pro - AND - edited the sound preferences in AE. I apologize to Red Giant for suspecting their software!

Comments:

I wonder why AE can't tackle this. By installing CS4 Production Premium, my hard drive's real estate was set back 20Gb (!). Still this application is not equipped with software that will circumvent these kind of problems when loading, no message telling me that "Sound driver preferences are bad - default preferences are used instead". It just hangs!!

AE uses WDM sound. It should be able to handle ASIO in a WDM wrapper, but it cannot handel it natively. I think Premiere and Sounbooth do, though. So in essence AE crashed due to attempting to initialize the card incorrectly. I'm sure this can be remedied by enabling some compatibility switch in the audio config, also, but if removing the line does the trick, success can hardly be argued. As they say: Fortune favors the bold!

I did it wrong when trying to tweak the sound settings in AE. I am used to this, other applications do not recognize my ESI 1010. AE, however, does, and it uses WDM and my ESI 1010, in accordance with the settings. Total silence reigns at the moment though, so I'll have to find out why AE is so quiet.

Anyhows - thanks to all of you who responded, without this response I would probably not have come up with the idea of switching user. Having switched user, and seeing that AE started fine, the rest was a matter of time to narrow down the problem.

The bizarre thing is that before, I had to do a system restore because of my Nvidia Card (which is still not working), I had this same problem but I fixed it when I installed AE updates directly from within the program. Then I was able to import all media files. but now i cannot import any audio or video or Adobe Premiere project files!!

NOPE!!haha its simple just install the older versions of quicktime like Quick Time 7 and beloW! or just run adobeqt32server.exe at startup even if your quicktime is updated or you can create a shortcut adobeqt32server.exe and run it!, for Newbies the directory of adobeqt32server.exe is C:/Program Files/Adobe/Adobe After Effects CS5/Support Files/32/Adobe QT32 Server.exe Thank you!

Anti Virus software from just about every manufacturer has been known to cause intermittent problems, slowdowns, and crashes at various times for many Windows users.

The problems have not been limited to Adobe. Any app that writes to disk in the background can be broken by anti-virus software. If a windows machine I was on suddenly stopped working properly or failed to install an app that's the first place I'd look. The second, video codecs. The third, fonts. They all can easily go screwy and foul things up.

Same problem. I renamed the C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CS4\Support Files\(Media Core plug-ins)\Common to common1. Started and gave a Media Core error but still loaded. I renamed the folder to Common and failed again. My solution was to uninstall Quick Time.

The easiest way to fix this is to Delete your user account and create a new one. In my experience the problem exists somewhere in the usuer preferences. I can log out and sign in as a different user and AE fires right up. This does seem to be an issue with AE not working well with Adobe QT32 Server.exe. I reinstalled AE, removed all plugins, un-installed anre reinstalled quicktime, all to no avail. The best and easiest solution has been to: 1) move all stuff you want from your user account (my documents, my music folder, desktop, Outlook database files etc) to a renamed folder on your C drive. 2) Create a new User account. 3) Delete your old user account. 4)login as new user and copy over any old files you saved on your C drive. This should wipe any problems that were burried in the user acount.

> As with most other CS5 problems, it's 100% Quicktime related. Fact. Look no further.

One of the possible causes for this is related to QuickTime---specifically QuickTime failing to load a bad third-party codec (usually an AVI importer). See the second solution on this page for details:

I had this problem too sometimes when opening After Effects...when it got stuck at "Initialising MediaCore" i 'End Proccess' from task manager ans restart AE but still had th same problem...so what i did after that was I try switching off my Internet or disconnect from the Internet and try relauch AE..and it works!!

I did find one other easily fixed cause that locked up my AE CS6. In looking through System Preferences, the Perian utility that has DivX and other tools for media playback luckily indicated that "It was installed twice". I removed the duplicate install and voila, everything back to normal. Hope this helps someone as it was very frustrating!

For CC 2015: The problem seems to be AVG anti-virus. I disabled AVG and it fixed everything. Apparently a recent update messed with Adobe. If the other troubleshooting methods don't work for you (re: adding exceptions to the firewall and/or changing read/write permissions of the Adobe folder in app data), this worked immediately.

For CC 2015: The problem seems to be AVG anti-virus. I disabled AVG and it fixed everything. Apparently a recent update messed with Adobe.

Yes. To be specific, Firewall, Computer, Identity, and Email options are all fine. HOWEVER, if you switch on either of the Web options (LinkScanner or Online Shield), it goes back to the QuickTime error and taking ages to start.